Genealogy Chat

Tracey, when you order a certificate online from GRO, remember to tick a box that asks if you have the GRO ref (which you do have if you have looked it up on ancestry or freebmd) and then you only pay £7 if you dont tick the box its a tenner.

Tracy you local reg office should only be charging you £7-00 for a certificate in any case ;;; babe

Babs

Nudging this up to remind Tracey of what we've already found.

Sue

The excitement doesn't wear off. I've been doing this for nearly nine years and I still jump up and down with excitement when I receive a certificate.

Oh thats a shame, and thank you for your very kind offer...(all help is gratefully received).

I cant wait...this is starting to get exciting now (I'm a big kid at heart!)

Buy a big folder to keep them in!!!!!

Contact me if you like when you get it, and I'll look in ancestry to see if we can get the next step back

P in NZ (stuck on all my own lines!!)

Bless your heart Peter, thank you for your help. I have just bought my first certificate!! Here's hoping that it will lead onto more and more.

You should go to http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificate/

The details you need to enter are
Oct, Nov, Dec Quarter
1931 Year
Place Tamworth
Vo;ume 6b
Page 924
Bride's name Florence Rimell

Nothing else needed.
It should cost you 7 pounds

Peter in NZ

I have just gone onto general register office and they want £10.00 per copy...is that the normal price? Or am I on the wrong site? Duh, sorry to be a pain.

I usuall get certs into New Zealand in about 10 days, so you should get yours in a week - depends how busy they are!!

P in NZ

Lol @ Heather's post...how did you know that my brain was so full to overload?!?!?

Oh brilliant! I shall do just that then. How long do you have to wait for a certificate once you have ordered?

You have all been so helpful.

I would be inclined to get the marriage cert first as that will give you enough info to get back to the 1901 census and earlier - that's when ancestry gets useful - but at the moment there are enough people on this site who will probably do ancestry lookups for you - once they know who to look for.

P in NZ

If you read the Tips for Newbies thread it will give you an overview of researching.

Your grandparents marriage cert would give you:

Both their names, their ages, their residence, their occupations, their fathers names and occupations and the witnesses names. From that information you can work backwards through certificates and census info plus lots of other goodies that I wont load your brain with now.

If I were you the first thing Id do is take a sub with ancestry.co.uk (you can have 14 days free trial) it has so many records including all the bmd index and the census 1901-1841 and much much more.

Have fun. Ill bump up the Tips for Newbies thread for you.

Thank you Sue,

So do you think that buying my grandparents marriage certificate would be a good start then?

This isn't a cheap hobby Tracey.

You do need to buy some certificates.

Later on as you get further back you may be lucky and find a lot of information on census details but even then you will probably need to get some certificates to check details.
Kind souls may do some census lookups for you and you might get lucky and find someone researching the same family.....but you'd need to check details to make sure they are accurate even then.

Best wishes
Sue

I can't beleive how helpful you all are...thank you so much.

I have since found out (from my first visit here) that my grandparents were married on boxing day, but unsure of the year.

Am I right in thinking that the only way to find out for sure is to buy the certificates? Doesn't that work out very very expensive? Isn't there a way of double checking first?

I am very grateful for all the help given to me regarding this, thank you.

If you think he was born Staffs then this is a possibility using the date on the death registration:


Births Sep 1910
SMITH William A Cheadle 6b 354


There's also this one in the same district where he died:


Births Dec 1910
SMITH William A Nuneaton 6d 423

Rose

In that case, it will probably be safest to get the marriage certificate first, which will state both Florence and William's fathers' names, and then use that info to try Peter's trick to get the right birth certificate.

Ref for the marriage certificate:

OND 1931 Tamworth 6b 924
Florence M. Rimell marriage to Smith

(not needed to order, but this does correspond with an entry for William A. Smith OND 1931 marriage to Rimell Tamworth 6b 924)

The death certificate is at odds with Tracey's dates.

His birthdate according to his death certificate is 1910.